Artificial neural controller synthesis for TORCS
With the development of science and technology, computer games, video games and mobile games as an entertainment are becoming more popular in our society. Although all of the digital games offer excellent graphics, the quality of gameplays is still a weak point of many games, particularly off-lin...
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2015
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| Online Access: | https://eprints.ums.edu.my/id/eprint/19579/1/Artificial%20neural%20controller%20synthesis%20for%20TORCS.pdf |
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| Summary: | With the development of science and technology, computer games, video games
and mobile games as an entertainment are becoming more popular in our society.
Although all of the digital games offer excellent graphics, the quality of gameplays
is still a weak point of many games, particularly off-line games. There are few
crucial issues that could improve off-line gameplay. Storyline, level of difficulty,
rewards, reinforcement used, gaming strategy, and the inclusion of None-Player
Character (NPC). NPC is an important factor in a game. Player can easily complete
the game if the NPC used is too easy to be defeated. In other way, player may
uninstall the game if they found the game is not beatable after spending few days
on the game. As such, there are many Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques have
been introduced and included in different games genres in order to generate better
and attractive NPC. Those NPCs may consist of human player characteristics and
behaviors in handling the game. Generating car racing game NPC is crucial as there
are complex problems found in car racing game. Many factors can influence the
controller's behavior such as varying road conditions, damage control and
unexpected behaviors of opponents. The inclusion of AI technique could generate
better car racing game NPC and it is also beneficial to autonomous mobile car
manufacturing as the generated controllers could be transferred to real car for auto
piloting. In this research, a free open source 3D-based simulator named The Open
Racing Car Simulator (TORCS) is chosen as the research platform. The main
motivation of this research is to investigate whether hybrid Differential Evolution
(DE) and Feed-forward Neural Network (FFNN) as well as hybrid Pareto-based
Differential Evolution (POE) and FFNN could generate better controllers that could
replace normal NPC used in the car racing games. The focuses of the experiments
involved four main research objectives: (1) to test the feasibility of the hybrid DE
and FFNN in TORCS; (2) to obtain a suitable fitness function for evolving
autonomous car controllers; (3) to reduce the time taken in the optimization
processes and improve the efficiency of controllers' driving behaviors by minimizing
the number of sensors used; and (4) to determine which combination of multiobjective
functions is most suitable for evolving the required autonomous car
controllers. The results showed: (1) DE hybrid FFNN could generate optimal
controllers, (2) the proposed fitness function had successfully generated the
required car's racing controllers, (3) the proposed minimization algorithm had been
successfully minimize the number of RF sensors used, (4) the PDE algorithm could
be implemented to generate optimal solutions for car racing controllers, and (5) the
combination of components for average car speed and distance between the car
and track axis is very important compared to other components. As a conclusion,
this research has shown that the DE hybrid FFNN algorithm and PDE hybrid FFNN
algorithm are useful and promising in evolving autonomous car racing controller. |
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